Until recently, the addressing of envelopes in a business environment has created no particular difficulty. An envelope was merely placed in a typewriter and the address typed. With the advent of automatic typewriters, this procedure became even easier. After an envelope was inserted in the typewriter, the address as it appeared on the letter was "selected" and automatically typed onto the envelope. Increasingly, however, letters are being produced by laser printers coupled to computers. Unfortunately, laser printers are not well suited for printing envelopes. There is typically no bin available for envelopes so that they must be fed by hand. Also, because of the cost of laser printers, they are often shared by two or more people, resulting in wasted time and effort as the users get up from their desks to go to the printer to feed envelopes. In addition, in order for an envelope to fit into a laser printer and/or to feed properly without skewing, it should be fed lengthwise, which requires that the address information be printed in "landscape" orientation (90 degrees to the ordinary text direction). The styles available for "landscape" printing are often very limited and more often than not, the address must be printed in a style and/or size different from the accompanying letter.
Thus, addressing of envelopes has become a problem. One solution to the problem, of course, is to have an ordinary typewriter available to type addresses. This solution is not satisfactory, however, since space around secretarial desks is usually at a premium, and matching typestyles is often difficult. The cost of the extra equipment required is an additional deterrent to this solution. Feeding sheets of adhesive-backed labels through a laser printer is not a satisfactory solution either, since a single address label is too small to feed properly, and it is usually inconvenient to collect and print a number of addresses simultaneously on a sheet of labels. There is also the ever present danger that a label will become detached from its backing sheet during transit through the printer, resulting in an expensive service call to remove the label. Using adhesive-backed labels is particularly inconvenient when the printer is shared and not at the user's desk. Prior to the present invention there was not a good solution to the problem.
The invented Image Transfer Label provides a fast and convenient way to apply an address to a business envelope where the original letter is produced by a laser printer or similar printing system, such as a xerographic copier. There are other applications for the present invention, as will no doubt occur to those skilled in the art, but the invention will be described below in the context of addressing envelopes since the invention is particularly well suited for this application.